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This is amazing stuff that you need to see and hear from MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld at TED. It’s all about what comes after the Digital Revolution. Where the bits of computing meet with the atoms of the physical world in digitizing fabrication. It’s mind-blowing to think that we are indeed on the verge of a whole other revolution. It reminded me of iWoz, where Steve Wozniak described his excitement and the ideas that he and the Homebrew Club had with building personal computers. For them realizing the potential of what every day people could do with a computer in their home, which was completely unheard of by most in those days, parallels with this today. The difference is, with the internet, TEDtalks, podcasts and online video, everyday people like you and me can be IN on these incredible ideas.

For some insight into the reality of what developments are going on, have a look:

3 Responses to “Neil Gershenfeld: After the Digital Revolution”

[...] That’s a powerful statement right there. And I’m starting to hear more and more of this as I learn about what’s going on in development centers like the Fab Labs Neil Gershenfeld talks about in his TEDtalk and the Computational Synthesis Lab at Cornell University. In my previous post on Neil Gershenfeld , he talked about how technology will allow everyday people to create their own local solutions (although maybe not with local designs) to local problems and how personal manufacturing with home fabbers will completely change the way we buy the goods for our homes. Fabbing is literally teleportation. Designs of goods that can be fabricated at home in the amounts and to the requirements you need, completely displacing how goods are manufactured and distributed today. [...]

[...] Interestingly Evan’s Phd Advisor Dr. Hod Lipson, also wrote an article in IEEE Spectrum two years ago echoing many of the sentiments of Neil Gershenfeld. And even though he makes some pretty strong connections between the science fiction nature like possibilities of fabbing at the time, I think even he would be surprised to see two years later how an open source type model is producing an exciting prototype and garnering so much interest. [...]

[...] If you want to know more about Neil Gershenfeld and his views on “After the Digital Revolution”, have a look at MITMedia Lab and also this previous post on his fascinating presentation at TEDtalks in 2006. Don Norman, a professor, designer and researcher of the relationship between technology and people, recently published The Design of Future Things. Listen to Core77’s Bruce Tharp interview podcast with him. [...]